Ordering Life: Karl Jordan and the Naturalist Tradition

Essay on Sources

Essay on Sources Archives The most important archival collection for the Tring naturalists is the Tring Museum Correspondence held at the Natural History Museum in London. Even in this wonderful collection, however, the traces of their life and work are limited in certain ways. Charles Rothschild commanded that his own correspondence be burned.* And the more than eighty thousand letters in the surviving collection, on which much of this study is based, is limited to incoming correspondence between 1892 and 1908, with the exception of four carefully bound letter books of outgoing correspondence for the first few years of the museum (after the 1908 scandal, all outgoing correspondence was carefully preserved as well). Legend has it that the rest of the letter books were burned in an effort to tidy up the museum after Jordan’s death.† I have only scratched the surface of this archive, and fascinating tales await future researchers, especially regarding Rothschild’s collectors and the network of natural history agents. In particular, the archive is a tremendous resource for anyone interested in the collectors in the field, Ernst Hartert and Walter Rothschild’s life and work, the hundreds of naturalists with whom the “Tring Triumvirate” exchanged information and specimens, and of course different perspectives on Jordan himself. The Naturalist Tradition since Darwin The history of the naturalist tradition is eloquently summarized in Paul Lawrence Farber’s Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson (John Hopkins University Press, 2000). Farber’s various papers on the topic, includ- * Miriam Rothschild to Harry Hoogstraal. October 27, 1964. Harry Hoogstraal Papers, Box 51, RU 7454, Smithsonian Institution Archives. † Miriam Rothschild, Dear Lord Rothschild: Birds, Butterflies, and History (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 299–301. 358 essay on sources ing “The Transformation of Natural History in the Nineteenth Century,” in the Journal of the History of Biology 15 (1982):145–152, strongly influenced this book. In particular, Farber’s insistence that “overly stressing the impact of general theories on taxonomy” ignores the “cumulative aspects of the history of systematics, and glosses over other changes that have occurred in natural history,” has guided my choices in deciding what to focus on in Jordan’s story; see his “Theories for the Birds: An Inquiry into the Significance of the Theory of Evolution for the History of Systematics,” in Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall, edited by Margaret Osler and Paul Farber (Cambridge University Press, 1985). The work of Garland Allen, particularly his classic Life Science in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1978), is an important starting point for studying the history of the naturalist tradition in the twentieth century. Allen’s work inspired a wealth of further research by scholars intent on testing his thesis that natural history declined amid the rise of experimental sciences and that the fields are opposed. See the contributions to The American Development of Biology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988) and The Expansion of American Biology (Rutgers University Press, 1991), both books edited by Ronald Rainger, Keith Benson, and Jane Maienschein. The work has continued in, among others, Bruno Strasser’s “Collecting and Experimenting: the Moral Economies of Biological Research, 1960s–1980s,” in Preprints of the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, 310 (2006): 105–123, and Lynn K. Nyhart’s “Natural History and the ‘New’ Biology,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord , and E. C. Spary, 426–443 (Cambridge University Press, 1996). A pioneer of relating natural history to its broader social context is David Elliston Allen. See his The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (Princeton University Press, 1994, orig. published 1976) and “On Parallel Lines: Natural History and Biology from the Late Victorian Period,” Archives of Natural History 25 (1998): 361–371. For further background on the history of natural history, see the papers in N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge University Press, 1996). The histories of biology composed by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr provide a fascinating perspective of one who lived and experienced much of this history. Mayr wrote his histories with the explicit aim of defending the role of naturalists in the history of biology. His The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Harvard University Press, 1985) was simply the most ambitious of a wealth of writings on the history of evolution biology and systematics. Indeed, Mayr’s first excursion into...